Jamelle Bouie likes to indulge in everything he likes, as much as he can.
For some people, that may result in them losing their job. But when you are a New York Time opinion columnist whose interests include politics, history and movies, indulging in what you like means writing insightful, relevant opinion columns.
“I view myself as someone who has the extremely good fortune of having a relatively low-pressure job that allows me to spend a lot of time reading academic history and academic work and talking to academics,” Bouie said. “And I see my job is sort of taking that and kind of translating it for the general public.”
Activist Alice Wong, UW expert Sami Schalk discuss disability justice in era of COVID-19
Bouie’s interest in the world of public affairs began when he was young. In high school, he volunteered as a poll worker and attended both Democrat and Republican local meetings with the goal of simply “observing.”
In a similar fashion, Bouie was attracted to history.
“When I think of history, you can find … instances of previous generations of Americans grappling with issues and challenges and problems that are different than ours — but that are not too different than ours,” Bouie said. “And we can learn from their grappling with those challenges, whether we learn for good or for ill or learn just through observing the process, and seeing how they came to the answers they came to.”
But for all of Bouie’s interests, journalism was not one of them. In fact, Bouie said he only fell into journalism after college, right when he was looking for a job and started writing freelance.
Bouie eventually got a fellowship to work with the American Prospect as a political correspondent. A few years later, Bouie began writing more opinion-styled pieces at Slate Magazine and then in 2019, the New York Times asked him to join them as a columnist, Bouie said.
“I generally just want people to come away from reading me feeling that they have learned something new,” Bouie said. “If I can accomplish that column to column basis, then I’m pretty happy.”
